Giving each developer access to a full mirror of the production environment might also not be financially viable. If a production scoped database fits on a small ssd, then your deployed production dB should probably not be on spinning metal trying to mitigate the orders of magnitude performance hit with boatload of expensive ram. If it doesn't fit, then obviously you have plentiful other issues that should be screaming at you that your laptop performance profiling is not going to make much sense.